Part I of this series was posted a few days ago and discussed some of the problems surrounding 6-day schedules. I recommend you read that posting before going forward with this one.
Today’s post will begin the focus on schedule patterns; specifically, those patterns that cover 24 hours a day for 6 days each week. I will cover one schedule per post for the next four posts so be sure to stay tuned.
Let’s start with the most basic way of covering 6 days. All you need to do is, sometime during the week, tell everyone, “I’ll see you all on Saturday.” Then, when everyone shows up on Saturdays (good luck with that), you will find that you have quite neatly covered 6 days a week.
The best thing about this pattern is that you can easily contract back to a 5-day schedule. Just don’t work on Saturday and you’re there. Another plus is the fact that the supervisors can stay with their crews. Employees will have mixed feelings about this. They don’t like working all of their Saturdays or having only one day off per week. They do, however, like getting 30% more pay (due to overtime) than they did when they had all of their weekends off.
On the down-side, this is not really a sustainable way to cover the 6th day. People are simply working too many days in a row with not enough time off to recuperate at the end of the week. One plant that I recently worked with showed a positive relationship between the number of days of work each month and the OSHA Recordable Rate – as the number of days went up, so did the Recordable Rate. In fact, the relationship was so strong that 56% of the increases and decreases in the Recordable Rate were statistically attributed to the number of days people worked. At the same time, this company’s Productivity Index showed an inverse relationship. As the number of days worked by an employee when up, the measure of productivity went down.
Call Us and We Can Help
Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005 to discuss your operations and how we can help you solve your shift work problems. You can also complete our contact form and we will call you.